Archive for March, 2012

Another terrific salad meal made the HumanaNatura way and using HumanaNatura’s OurPlate guidelines! This meal is extra healthy because it uses fish instead of meat, helping us to follow HumanaNatura’s recommendation to limit red meat and eggs to no more than 25 percent of our total protein. Though the fish used is from high in the marine food chain and thus slightly less desirable than simpler seafood varieties like shrimp, scallops, and baby squid (since they generally have less mercury and other accumulated toxins), game-fish like swordfish, tuna, and shark are still a healthy, lean, and nutrient-rich protein choice when used in moderation.

This delicious and satisfying salad meal begins with a spicy pan-seared tuna steak, seasoned with turmeric, onion and garlic bits, and black pepper. It’s paired with a green salad base and extra red veggie and fruit mix that includes a half-plate of mixed greens, diced cucumber, quartered grape tomatoes, and sliced fresh strawberries. Before serving, we’ve garnished it all with slivered almonds, parsley, paprika, coriander, anise seeds, and black pepper. A great way to begin, pause from, or finish your day!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple healthy eating and meal rating tool, and experience how this science-based and completely natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, we hope you will begin to explore your other opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – through HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness. Check out our overview at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

The idea that there are natural limits to the amount and type of red meat we consume remains controversial, even as many of us now understand this is likely the case. In our time, thoughtful people remain unconvinced that there are significant natural limits to red meat intake, often citing high meat consumption in aboriginal populations and the fact that our body weight can be held at natural levels via a diet that is high in red meat but low in carbohydrates. At the opposite end of the spectrum, others suggest that red meat should not be in our diet at all, and even that a vegan or animal-free diet best optimizes our health.

Since neither of these opposing points of view are supported by a preponderance of science (see, for example, Low-Carb Diets Linked to Atherosclerosis and Critical Look at the China Study), the more pressing question is instead how much and what types of red meat are optimal and best advance our health and longevity. We know that some amount of red meat is natural in humans, a regular part of the diets of many long-lived groups of people today, and potentially offers some health benefits – greatly increasing B-vitamins and minerals like iron, for example. But a wide variety of research suggests that too much red meat, especially of the processed variety, is significantly health-reducing. But how much and what forms of red meat are too much?

Sometimes, when we are preparing a salad meal the HumanaNatura way and using HumanaNatura’s OurPlate guidelines, the results are good and sometimes they are great. This example salad meal is in the great category and is especially healthy because of the proteins used. Not only have we used lean and healthy fish, but we have selected shellfish from low in the marine food chain – in this case, shrimp, scallops, and baby squid – and thus fish with lower levels of mercury. Using these foods reduces costs too, since these varieties of fish are often much less expensive than larger game fish.

This extra delicious and healthy salad meal was made in minutes and is about as tasty as food can get. It begins with a spicy saute of the shellfish we mentioned with a good dash of turmeric, onion and garlic bits, and black pepper. While the saute is cooking, we put together a salad base and mix that included a half-plate of arugula, diced cucumber, sliced mango and avocado, and quartered grape tomatoes. These warm and cool foods were then garnished with pistachios, parsley, paprika, coriander, and black pepper. A terrific meeting of earth and sea, and model for optimal daily eating!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple healthy eating and meal rating tool, and experience how this science-based and completely natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, we hope you will begin to explore your other opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – through HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness. Check out our overview at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Greetings from HumanaNatura at the equinox! In the natural year, we are at the halfway point between the extremes of darkness and light of the winter and summer solstices. Everywhere on earth, there is the greater relative balance and calm that naturally comes to our world twice each year with the equinox.

In the HumanaNatura natural health system, we recommend that practitioners use the opportunity of the equinox to review and update our Natural Life Plan, making changes as needed and renewing and revitalizing our commitment to progressive natural health and quality of life.

If you do not have a Natural Life Plan – guiding your use and personal expression of Natural Living, the third HumanaNatura technique in our natural health system – the link above will take you to our planning worksheets and help you to begin more intentional, health-centered, and progressive life in the days and weeks ahead.

Our newest community newsletter was released today as well, which is published eight times yearly in harmony with the natural year. To receive future HumanaNatura newsletters and learn about the benefits of membership in our global practitioner-activist network, go to Join HumanaNatura.

Salad meal eating the HumanaNatura way and using HumanaNatura’s OurPlate guidelines makes every new meal an added opportunity for new health…and even for new personal freedom! Think of it this way – we all will eat roughly 1000 meals in the next year. To lay the foundation for progressive and enduring health and fitness in our lives, 900 or more of these meals need to be actively health-promoting. Less than this, and our eating patterns will reliably curtail our health and reduce our natural fitness, even if we exercise regularly.

Thus, with each new meal, we have the opportunity to add to our healthy meal count, and preserve our ability to have an occasional meal that is less than ideal. 100 poor meal choices and we have no more nutritional freedom for the next year…900 good meal choices and we create added personal flexibility each day. What’s it going to be?

This easy-to-prepare and strongly health-promoting salad meal might help you to choose healthier meals each day. It starts with a turmeric and red pepper seasoned sauté of cut turkey breast and mixed veggies. It then adds a half-plate of arugula, along with diced orange, and sliced tomato and avocado. It’s all finished with pistachios, parsley, paprika, coriander, and black pepper. A wonderful way to promote our health, and our life and freedom!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple healthy eating and meal rating tool, and experience how this science-based and completely natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, we hope you will begin to explore your other opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – through HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness. Check out our overview at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Recent reports of a National Football League (NFL) bounty program in the United States, paying and encouraging players to injure their opponents, are a stark reminder that competition has important natural or rational limits.

In citing this example, however, we must immediately add that sports like professional football, in both its American and International varieties, is a modern preoccupation that already functions far beyond desirable natural limits for social competition – when judged from the standpoint of its net effect on the health and quality of life of its participants and fans.

After all, consider the influences of this most popular competitive sport of our times on the lives and health of those who participate in the sport or follow it avidly. In the case of NFL players, there is perhaps a five times higher risk of chronic cognitive health impairment and comparable risks of premature physical disability and degeneration. International football players fare somewhat better, but still are subject to greatly elevated risks of injury and long-term physical disability. We would add that in both of these and many other competitive sports, drug use is a widespread phenomenon – to enhance performance, to treat pain, and for escape from the unnatural stress and pressure of sports-related competition.

As for professional football fans, anyone who has been to a game in any professional-level league (and many below this level) knows firsthand the widely health-indifferent cultures that this sport and many other supernormally competitive pastimes reliably attract and foster. Such fan cultures are regularly and often strongly marked by patently unhealthy eating, excessive alcohol consumption, increased aggression and violence, elevated stress, obsessive and risk-seeking behaviors, and decreased enjoyment of essential but less stimulating life activities, to begin a list.

Salad meal eating the HumanaNatura way and using HumanaNatura’s OurPlate guidelines helps to optimize our daily portions of veggies, proteins, and fruits for lifelong health and fitness. In practice, once we adjust to having half our food volume come from raw veggies, our main focus becomes right-sizing our protein and fruit intake – to meet but not exceed our macro-nutrient and calorie needs, respectively. But right-sizing our daily protein foods does not have to mean less interesting meals, as our many example meals show. One way to optimize proteins and make sure our meals stay interesting over time is a change-up where we mix more than one protein in a meal, and this very tasty meal does just that.

Today’s quick and easy-to-prepare salad meal uses two proteins for extra taste and variety, and was made in about ten minutes. It begins with a stir-fry of sliced ginger chicken, shrimp, red onion, chopped broccoli, and diced tomato. This protein and veggie mix is served with our usual half-plate of mixed greens, along with coarsely slivered cucumber, tomato, and orange. It’s all finished with a few pistachios, parsley, coriander, a little lemon, and black pepper. Super healthy and a super satisfying mix of tastes!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple healthy eating and meal rating tool, and experience how this science-based and completely natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, we hope you will begin to explore your other opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – through HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness. Check out our overview at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.